Penn Institute editors in their letter regarding James Gill's commentary on Ed Blakely's book on New Orleans post-Katrina, say: "In decades to come, serious readers, scholars and other analysts will return to these works, making their own judgments about the people and the events that shaped history."

Specifically because Blakely gets it wrong, and they were too lazy to do the fact checking we should expect from a publisher, those who look back at history to "make their own judgments" (about us!) will get it wrong, too.

All we see in their response to the column (thank you, James Gill, again!) is a complete failure to understand context and no (zero, not even a little) interest or respect for the facts. For Gill to be able to say, "It would take another book to list all the errors in Blakely's," and the only response to be to say that Blakely's blather is "a revealing personal statement" is almost more insulting than Blakely's book.

Blakely was here -- clueless, but here. They are making decisions, and not checking the facts, from the comfort of their not-quite Ivory Tower and have shown themselves to be clueless, too. And not just by publishing the blather but by the totally lame defense of it. Do they really think that the people of New Orleans are too stupid to judge for themselves the potential long-term impact of the book? We are not too clueless to realize that, years in the future, someone could pick this up and actually think it is something more than a personal statement about Ed Blakely's ego. The thought makes us collectively shudder.

Shame on Penn Institute for Urban Research. Shame on the University of Pennsylvania. They should have known better.